'Call us peaceful, or you die'

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An old black spiritual tells it like it used to be: "Everybody
talkin' 'bout heaven ain't goin' there."

This is still the bottom line in
nearly everybody's catechism, but
it's no longer polite to say so. The
exception is militant Islam, which is
more political movement than faith
as faith is generally understood in
the West, and is not bashful about
consigning infidels to hell.

Militant Muslims, if not
necessarily Islam, can be lethal.
This is unfair to peaceful, moderate
Muslims. So a group of evangelical
Christians got together in
Washington the other day to
admonish some of the brothers
about what they described as
reckless talk about Islam.

They singled out the most prominent members of their
evangelical ranks - the Revs. Franklin Graham, Jerry
Falwell and Pat Robertson - for saying naughty things about
certain brands of Islam. Mr. Graham, the son of the foremost
Christian evangelist in the world and who offered the
invocation at the inauguration of President Bush, has called
Islam "evil" and "wicked." Jerry Falwell has described
Muhammad, the founder of Islam, as "a terrorist," and Pat
Robertson portrayed the Prophet as "an absolute wild-eyed
fanatic."

Tough stuff, descriptions which the evangelical brothers
and sisters did not argue with. "We're not compromising the
truth here, we're not whitewashing another religion, but we
need to learn to speak the truth in love and friendship," said
Susan Michael, the American director of the International
Christian Embassy in Jerusalem.

Richard Cizak, vice president of the National Association
of Evangelicals, said Americans must avoid "sweeping
generalizations about Islam that are either fawning on one
end, or hostile on the other."

Disrespectful though the remarks of Messrs. Graham,
Falwell and Robertson may be, they're mild compared with
the usual descriptions of Judaism and Christianity heard in
almost any mosque on almost any Friday. The imams have an
advantage, of course, because their sermons are usually
spoken in Arabic, which nobody but Arabs and a few others
understand. Christian sermons are preached in English, which
everybody understands well enough.

Offering secular critiques of theology is business for fools,
of course, and ordinarily only fools deliberately step between
preachers going at each other. Some of the most thrilling
spectacles of my childhood, in fact, were the monthly
congregational business meetings at my church when the
deacons raged in hot pursuit of the pastor, usually over
something trivial. Nothing at the dozen Democratic National
Conventions I've covered has ever come close to the
savagery of country Baptists at each other's throats. But none
of them ever commandeered an airliner and flew it into an
office tower.

The radical Muslims, and the moderate Muslims who are
either unwilling or afraid to confront the radicals, have thrust
their religion into the public square, insisting that Islam is a
political system as well as a faith, and this invites secular
examination of their goals, aims and motivations, and their
strategy for getting to those goals. Some of that strategy, as
the world saw on September 11, is violence in the name of
Allah. Muslim organizations in this country, so called, have
subsequently quibbled with, criticized and vigorously
condemned the war on terror and the U.S. liberation of Iraq.

President Bush, inadvertently or otherwise, has invited the
harsh rhetoric of Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell in
reaction to his frequent fawning descriptions of Islam as "a
religion of peace," and though most Americans understand
that the president has to say it even if he doesn't really believe
it, the constant refrain grates on the ears of Americans who
read newspapers.

The car-bombing of a Western residential compound
yesterday in Riyadh in the name of the faith is the latest
demonstration of the kind of "peace" that is the norm east of
Suez, where the best is, indeed, often indistinguishable from
the worst. Americans want to believe that Islam can in fact as
well as in rhetoric be a "religion of peace," and they can't
understand why such violence is not condemned - with
passion and conviction - by everyone who is anyone in the
Islamic world. Such organizations as the Committee on
American-Islamic Relations and the American Muslim
Council make occasional half-hearted criticism of
anti-American violence, but continue to support violent and
lawless organizations that target the West and friends of the
West (usually women and children).

For his part, Jerry Falwell thanked the National
Association of Evangelicals for their criticism and promised to
do better. "They're trying to do something noble," he told The
Washington Post.

But the nobility, such as it may be, can sound driven more
by fear than by compassion. Criticism at home has put
Christian missionaries at risk in the few Muslim countries that
allow freedom of belief. "Lives and livelihoods" have been put
at risk, says Clive Calver, president of the humanitarian arm
of the evangelical association.

Translation: "We've got to say how peaceful they are, or
they'll kill us."